"The internet no longer exists" is a particularly extreme subset of off-grid scenarios. For the more plausible off-grid scenarios—the ones that have actually happened—the unavailability of the internet has been varying degrees of localized and temporary. In that context, being able to bootstrap the entire network without any reliance on internet infrastructure is more of a convenience than a hard requirement.

In particular, it seems obvious to me that any preparedness plan that requires a user to acquire in advance specialized hardware (eg. a battery/solar-powered long-range radio of some kind) to be used with an off-grid network can reasonably expect that user to also be prepared with the software to drive that hardware.

If you can't figure out how to store dependencies locally you shouldn't be operating a network so everything kind of balances itself out.

Just so I understand, what sort of bootstrap process are you looking for? Even a pre-built binary is going to require a download? If you build from source (e.g., C), you’re going to need to download the source code and a compiler. I’m not much a Python guy myself, but installing via pip doesn’t seem particularly bad. But I’m probably missing your point.

Ha! I believe every RNode can be used to bootstrap a Reticulum network, as that tiny ESP32 hosts the RNode firmware, the full network software stack and documentation! The RNode has the capability to become a Wifi access point, if you connect you get this at 10.0.0.1.:

https://unsigned.io/rnode_bootstrap_console/

Shit's insanely well thought out! I encourage everyone to dive in a bit. It's pure tech porn. (If you can endure the occasional Ayn Rand quote lol.)

> but none of them have clear protocol specification docs

This is a big turn off for me. I have seen it for a number of protocols beyond mesh ones. ESP-Hosted does this too. So does ELRS. Maybe I'm too used to reading data sheets etc, but if your protocol requires a specific implementation, I am put off by the friction: I must integrate your software, in the language you used, and will likely hit compatibility problems as a result.

Reticulum has no bandwidth management. If your node or the whole local area is flooded with traffic from the rest of the network there is nothing you can do.

"Reticulum does not include source addresses on any packets" and with that you cannot throttle passing-through traffic based on source. Any hope of scaling is gone.

Meshtastic is the most popular in my area. I can see about 150 nodes from my house in a US county of ~300K (though actually being able to talk to most of those remains questionable).

I am certain the popularity of Meshtastic is down to how easy they have made it to onboard. Buy the module, flash using the web flasher, install the app on your phone, done. There's a Youtube tutorial on every street corner for this, even though I (and seemingly many people) don't find Meshtastic to be all that reliable.

For reference, this is what Meshtastic has to say about their flood-based mesh protocol: https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/mesh-algo/

Seattle is showing >400 nodes for meshcore: https://meshcore.co.uk/map.html

Reticulum is absolutely not flood routed and is not "LoRa-based" lmao. Typical hn comment.

Planetary-scale networks is mentioned as a design goal on the first page of the docs https://reticulum.network/ which are hidden at the very top of the git repo.

But the part about the undersea cable is simply wrong! Major undersea cables have been disrupted several times and never has a "continent gone dark".

I think this betrays a severe misunderstanding of what the internet is. It is the most resilient computer network by a long shot, far more so than any of these toy meshes. For starters, none of them even manage to make any intercontinental connections except when themselves using the internet as their substrate.

Now of course, if you put all your stuff in a single organization's "cloud", you don't get to benefit from all that resilience. That sort of fragile architecture is rightly criticized but this falls flat as a criticism of the internet itself.

People naturally want to maximize the value they extract from any system.

If you hand individuals or groups the internet, they will naturally use it for spam, advertisement, scams, information harvesting, propaganda, etc - because those are what gain them the most.

The 'enshittification' if the internet was inevitable the moment it came into existence, and is the result of the decision of its users just as much as any one central authority.

If you let people communicate with each other on a large scale at high speeds, that's what you get.

The only way to avoid the problem is to make a system that has some combination of the following:

* No one uses

* Is slow

* Is cumbersome to use

* Has significant barriers to entry

* Is feature-poor

In a such a system, there's little incentive to have the same bad behaviors.

The author discovered Conways law and got frustrated

Too bad nobody wrote a book called “the mythical man month” to dispel the majority of fantasies that engineers have about the way the world works

A) In self-defense, you don't intend to harm humans, but are only doing so when it's down to your life or theirs. So such a system could be argued to not be designed to harm humans, but instead preserve your own life.

B) In any case, I'm OK with it. Having the software explicitly licensed like this may prevent it from being legally considered a terrorism tool or munition if a bad actor were to be found connected with it, and if that happens, that's going to have much more freedom-restricting consequences with respect to the software.

>Willing to kill.

>Not willing to violate the license of a software package.

I'm sure such militias wouldn't worry about the ToS.

However there's a chance apartheid and authoritarian countries would not use it exactly because of this.

It's such a strange and unfortunate addition to the project. Also, what's the point of assuming every entity is potentially hostile? Can't you just put in the license "you're not allowed to be malicious or hostile on this network"?

I suspect such groups don’t really care about abiding by the terms of a license agreement. You can sue them… if you can find them.

The maintainer is actively saying they’re stepping back from the project

so explain to me how the license is going to be enforced?

The exact text is "The Software shall not be used in any kind of system which includes amongst its functions the ability to purposefully do harm to human beings."

This is an example of the HN "Jump to Conclusions Mat" where there is an instant jump to extremely high level politics and philosophy and skipping over the more practical mundane problems.

A more practical issue is the author has zero interest in being sued if my LoRA connected emergency stop button for my CNC milling machine crashes and the machine then hurts someone (possibly myself).

Or my "emergency alert" transponder fails when I'm in the wilderness and someone (maybe me) dies instead of being rescued.

The wildest part of the story which isn't being covered is this is an example of one guy doing all the work to produce something more capable than the entire meshtastic project in about a year. A real life example of 10x or 100x engineers. How can meshtastic accomplish so little if one guy accomplished so much? Historically it was not THAT bad where having more than one person work on a network protocol never killed progress for decnet or banyan vines or SNA or any other old time protocol, but maybe its a mesh network thing that having more than one cook in the kitchen eliminates all progress.

Unfortunately, being a pretty much 1 person project he doesn't have the legal skills to realize the license as written is awful and needs rewriting to achieve his goals, assuming his goals are even a good idea...

I've set this up and used it on my LAN at home. Its a LOT more than just LoRA or just meshtastic and its pretty cool and works well. The app on my phone works well. Being abandonware I'm shutting it down "when I get around to it". The ratio of Meshcore to Meshtastic users/traffic is around 20:1 in my area so I'll be setting up Meshcore to fit in. Mesh LoRA is very local just like cell phone service; I'm well aware there are parts of the world operating at an opposite ratio of popularity where you "have to" use meshtastic to fit in. That is not where I live so I must use meshcore.

Meshtastic isn't used here, so I can't mesh so cross that off. Reticulum works perfectly and is abandonware so cross that off. Meshcore has its ... interesting pay money to unlock features scheme, I can't decide if I like or dislike that, I'd like to cross that off but its the only remaining protocol. I could write my own and GPLv2 it but if a superior system (reticulum) can't get buy in, my better licensed system would also be unused. I think I am stuck having to use Meshcore, I about 95% like that and 5% dislike that.

I do find it amusing that I used ham radio AX.25 packet radio in the late 80s, early 90s, some times this century, I know all about digipeating problems and hidden transmitter problems and all the stuff the "kids" refuse to do a literature search for and seem surprised when it bites them. Really this mesh stuff is just ham packet radio from 1981 except the total cost of a station is like $15 vs back in the day it was oh at least $1000. I had a node running linux AX25 back in the 90s and I'm sure I had a couple thousand bucks in equipment by the time I was done, mostly repurposed later on. I still have several hardware TNCs in some closet or shelf somewhere...

Dead internet theory [1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory